


Snowy Days And Purple Haze Rhyme For A Reason

by Cosmicserenity



Series: Cannibalism vs Justice: but make it friendly and college-related [3]
Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Again, Alana is mentioned - Freeform, College AU, Established Friendship, Gen, Hannibal doesn't eat people, Hannibal most definitely mains Peach, High Hannibal, Instant Noodles, Jack doesn't have a lot of friends, Jack's 19, Mario Kart, Midterms, Recreational Drug Use, Soft Hannibal, The Author is most definitely projecting, They're smokin the devil's lettuce, and Hannibal's 22, because hey, but neither does hannibal so u know the vibes, cause why not bro, hannibal with painted nails, high Jack, may be ooc, no one dies, platonic, procrastination, spoiler-free, the concept of hannibal being high is fuckin bonkers, these two are just homies, yay him, yes. again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:07:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28105209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cosmicserenity/pseuds/Cosmicserenity
Summary: "Hannibal, I have a question.""Yes, Jack?""Let's say your arm gets chopped off. Where do you feel it?""Well, you'd feel it in your-" Hannibal's answer started off strong but faltered almost immediately as whipped around to face his roommate, his face growing pale and his reddened eyes expanding almost three times their size. "Holy shit."The fact that Hannibal didn't know the answer to that question despite being a pre-med student was one of two things:Hilarious, and a sign that the weed they had smoked was way too strong for either of them to handle.--Alternate title: The two get blazed UP on a Thursday night.
Relationships: Jack Crawford & Hannibal Lecter
Series: Cannibalism vs Justice: but make it friendly and college-related [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2047718
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	Snowy Days And Purple Haze Rhyme For A Reason

**Author's Note:**

> I literally have 16 missing assignments but I watched Hannibal as I was doing one of them and my brain just went "Jack and Hannibal would be a riot if they got high together". So, here we are.

Jack Crawford was dying.

That had to be what it was, right? It was the only explanation for the dark circles under his eyes, the constant migraines, the will to do anything but his English Literature homework, and the cracking of his back every time he remotely moved about in his office chair. He had to have been going through some sort of -itis, -osis, or some other type of fancy sounding disease, and the half-empty Google Docs page he was staring at that only had his name and the date typed on it was probably the last catalyst needed to make him keel right over onto the dirty carpet of his college apartment and stay like that until his roommate checked in on him the next morning.

Or, maybe Jack Crawford was just buried under loads of last minute mid-term assignments that he really didn’t want to do.

Was he being overdramatic? Well, yes, probably- but it didn’t matter at the time, and especially not when every time he turned around to look at himself in the mirror, he saw the walking corpse of a college sophomore staring back at him. For the past three and a half hours, Jack had been doing nothing but typing, researching, citing sources and then doing more typing, and he had stopped retaining the information he was reading after he pressed ‘submit’ on his paper on ‘the history of Burlesque Theatre’. He needed a break, now more than anything, and as he shot up from his seat and smacked his hands on the top of his desk, he figured that the best way to do that was with a relaxing bath, a warm cup of tea, and an early rest to greet the coming day with a smile on his face.

No, what he really intended to do was to get as high as a kite and maybe cry about the Cs on his gradebook.

Grabbing the ‘snowy day’ supply of weed he had tucked in his lower desk drawer and snatching out a pre-rolled joint from the plastic bag (courtesy of a ‘friend’ from college), he skimmed through the note that she had placed with it and rolled his eyes. It was a warning, something about how he wouldn't be able to 'handle' smoking more than half, but he waved it off. Alana had a habit of making things seem worse than they actually were.

Jack reached for the lighter that usually sat on his bedroom windowsill and only found himself grabbing fruitlessly at the air. Shit- he had left it on the dining table yesterday, hadn’t he? Going to grab it wouldn’t serve to be too much of an inconvenience, at least not as much as the Google Doc that he now just simply refused to look at, and he stuffed the joint in his hoodie pocket as he made his way to his bedroom door and swung it open. 

Coincidentally, the bedroom door across from him opened just as his did, and his roommate stood on the other side of the tiny hallway with an expression on his face that was just as surprised as Jack's must have been. They were probably just shocked at how horrible the both of them looked, with his roommate’s wild brown hair complimenting Jack’s barely there 5 o’clock shadow and his faded Johns Hopkins sweatshirt serving opposite his coffee stained Maryland State University hoodie, and they froze in their spots as the both of them tried to think of something to say. Frankly, Jack wasn’t used to seeing the Hannibal Lecter, his intellectual God of a roommate, look anything less than 100%. Right about now he looked to be at 5%.

The once crisp black polish on his nails had anxiously chipped off sometime in between now and the last time they had seen each other, his usual beige house slippers had been replaced with fuzzy Slytherin socks, and wide-rimmed glasses now framed the man’s face, all of which Jack didn’t question, but he couldn’t help but try to disguise a snicker when the realization of his roommate’s own ‘unkemptness’ dawned on the man and he moved to straighten his hair with the smoothing over of his hands. “Hello, Jack. I take it that your studies are going well?”

“Just about as well as yours seem to be.” Jack motioned to his wardrobe and then to Hannibal’s with a laugh, one that was matched with a humorous exhale from across from him.

“In that case, would you care to join me in taking a short break?”

“Sure, I have time.”

Jack focused his eyes on the window as he moved to sit down at their dining table, Hannibal pouring the both of them tea as a way to 'calm themselves down', and focused on the blizzard of snow that piled onto the fire escape outside of their living/dining room with a stare that wondered why snow days weren't a thing in college, too.

In the first place, he had mainly agreed to take a break with Hannibal because he didn't want to face the look that came with saying 'nah, I'd much rather get high, look at my laptop screen and irrationally wonder why I'm disappointing my family', but it wasn't too big a deal. Hannibal made excellent conversation, and he was always a fun person to hang around. Often intimidating, with his height, way of speaking and overall status, but fun.

“So, what courses are you struggling with?” Just as Jack thought of him, Hannibal walked towards him, handing him a tea mug with a quaint design of a napping duck on the face of it. 

“Just about all of them.” Jack answered, graciously grabbing the cutely designed mug of tea and waiting until Hannibal sat down across him to take a sip. “You?”

Hannibal gulped, Jack unintentionally ripping off a mental band-aid that was probably hardly hanging on in the first place. “Biochemistry. There is a group project I am in, and the completion of it is worth around twenty percent of my overall grade.”

“Ah, so someone’s holding you back?” Jack nodded in understanding. Group projects were always horrible- and apparently, the thought was shared even with Johns Hopkins students.

“Quite the opposite.” Hannibal confessed with another sip of his tea. “There are a multitude of equations I’ve been unable to solve correctly for the portion of the report I’ve been assigned.”

 _Oh shit. Hannibal Lecter's having an issue with school?_ “I would offer to help, but my skills are more than limited in the math and sciences.” Jack almost added ‘hence my 74% in Statistics’, but kept his mouth shut. Reliving the memory of seeing that grade was like a soldier remembering a war.

“Your sentiments are more than enough, Jack.” He assured him with a small smile, pushing his glasses to the top of his head and massaging the bridge of his nose. 

A few minutes and a few more sips later and the two were now officially sitting in silence, the heaviness of homework laying down on the both of their shoulders and falling asleep there.

“This would be where I should take my leave, but to be frank- I can’t find the will to return to that computer just yet.” Hannibal mumbled, tapping on the table and shaking his head.

“Me neither.”

Then came the silence again, and Jack clutched his empty mug with the inklings of a thought spinning around in his brain.

_...Would Hannibal be open to-_

_No, no way._

Jack eyed Hannibal, who seemed to be none the wiser of the idea that was being formed in the younger man’s mind, and tried to discern whether or not he’d be open to smoking with him while the two procrastinated in doing their homework. It was always better to smoke with someone, sharing smoke and even dumber thoughts, and Hannibal seemed like he would be the absolutely ideal person to get lit up with (plus, the two men had already gotten wine drunk like 8 times in the three months they had spent living together).

He found that there was no real point in wondering about his answer, and decided to go for the kill now just to see what would happen. After all, if he said no, it wouldn’t be that big a deal- and if he said yes, that would just make the experience all the more amusing.

“Have you...ever tried smoking marijuana, Hannibal?”

“Not that I can recall.”

At the sound of his answer, Jack wasted no time in putting the joint out in full display, setting it down on the table and clasping his hands together. “Would you like to?” 

Hannibal looked at the joint Jack pulled out of his pocket curiously, pointing at it like it had committed a crime, and tilted his head. “It seems dubiously ironic to have a criminal justice major offer me this.”

“My major’s never stopped me from smoking it before, and it’s definitely not going to tonight.” He made sure to assure him of the fact with the slight waving of his hand, swatting away the subject like it was a mosquito in the room. “Either way, I just suggest we light up, smoke a bit, and play a few games of Mario Kart to unwind for a couple of hours until we get back to work. I promise, I’m not trying to set you up.” 

Jack referenced Hannibal’s earlier statement, motioning to the gaming console that sat on their tv stand and then to the joint like he was showcasing a prize on The Price Is Right. “So?” 

Hannibal stood from the dining table and grabbed their mugs, looking around like there were cameras in the room, and nodded his head with an innocent eagerness. “Just allow me to put our mugs in the sink, first.”

If Jack’s eyes could sparkle, then his pupils probably would have been the equivalent of a starry night sky in that moment. 

“You're definitely not gonna regret this."

He couldn’t keep himself from wriggling his eyebrows with a smile that screamed ‘frivolous intentions’ as he and Hannibal went to prepare for their two-person party in their own ways, with Hannibal setting the mugs in the kitchen sink and Jack setting up the game and choosing their characters in the living room, and he was the first to take a hit as he lit the messily rolled cigarette and inhaled just as Hannibal walked in with a few handfuls of potato chips placed neatly in a bowl. 

“I take it that you're Bowser, and I'm Princess Peach?” Hannibal said with a laugh, trading the bowl of chips for the controller on the table and sitting down next to him. He smiled at the pre-selected Princess Peach that was being displayed on the tv screen, and Jack smiled at the thought of finally being able to beat Hannibal at Mario Kart. Out of the 5 times they had played together, Jack had won once, and that was less than ideal for the competitive man who at one point made a game with his sisters on who could irritate their parents the fastest.

“Hey, they're our go-tos. Plus, Bowser works better for me anyway.” Jack told Hannibal, handing the blunt to him.

“But not well enough to beat Princess Peach." Hannibal took it gently in his hands and took a drag, smiling at Jack's obvious exasperation. For a man who had never smoked before, he did it well. "Where did you even get this from, anyway?” A rebel cough escaped his lips as Hannibal passed the joint back to Jack just as the game said ‘go’.

“My junior in college. She’s… partly a friend of mine.” Jack rushed to push the blunt back in the corner of his lips as he maneuvered Bowser about the track, watching Peach drift past him and narrowing his eyes.

“Why partly?”

“Because half of me likes her, and the other half hates her guts.”

“Has she done something to you?” Hannibal looked at him for a moment, but snapped his eyes back to the screen after watching Bowser take his place from around the corner.

“No.” Jack finally had a distance away from the other drivers while in first place and took the opportunity to hand Hannibal the blunt back. “She’s just too idealistic.”

He narrowly dodged a green shell as he finished the first lap, leaning sideways on his beanbag chair as he moved with the controller. “She floats around on this weird philosophy that everyone is good if you just give them a chance, and that anything can be redeemed if the person shows even a sliver of kindness.”

“And you do not share in that philosophy?”

“Of course not.” Jack took the joint Hannibal offered him and passed it back after taking a swift puff, smiling despite his conversation as the finish line got closer. No one’s inherently a good person- everybody’s a mixed bag, a walking moral grey area. A man can be kind and be a monster, too.”

“I can’t help but agree.” Hannibal nodded stoutly. “But, Jack?”

“Yeah?”

“I should have said this earlier, but-” Just as he spoke, a spiky, evil little shell whirled around Bowser before falling down onto him like a grand piano, wiping his spot instantly as 4 more racers rode past him. “Watch out for the blue shell.”

The game ended with Bowser in 6th place and Peach taking 1st, and Jack snatched the joint from Hannibal’s long fingers with a faked smile. 

“Hah, hah ha.” The sarcasm slithered from his tongue as he pressed the controller to move onto the next map, taking in the vapor with a sigh and then blowing the smoke out of the side of his mouth. “Best out of three, remember?”

“Three laps, or three games?”

“Three games. The less time spent doing those assignments, the better. ” 

The older man hummed in a heavy vibrato of agreement, taking the joint back and watching Lakitu float in the corner of the screen. “With the way you’re playing, though, I don’t even think you’ll be able to make it to three games.”

Hannibal was wrong. Turns out, neither of them could make it past the _second_ game, much less the third one.

Around 2 laps and half a joint later, Hannibal and Jack had found themselves taking a ‘pause’ to work out how Princess Peach could drive in an entire go-kart even despite having to wear hip supports, a corset, a petticoat, and a _fichu_ (Jack had no clue what a fichu was until Hannibal told him, and then they spent a solid five minutes laughing like madmen at the concept of a handkerchief being tied around the top of someone’s ass) under her dress. After 2 more laps, they were too busy talking about their favorite cartoons and who their first cartoon crushes were, and by the time they had started the second game and finished their blunt, they were so zoned out they just stared at the piranha plants in the background of the lap until they both finished in 11th and 12th place, respectively. How did those game designers get them to move like that? It was like they were dancing, or something.

After that clear sign that they were slowly getting more and more stoned as they sat in the smoke, they collectively agreed that there was no way in hell they could keep playing the game, leaving both their score of 3-2 and their piranha plant fascination behind as Jack turned the game off. They took a short break to make themselves a ‘midnight snack’ of instant noodles with miso, char siu and sautéed bok choy (Jack helped, but Hannibal did most of the heavy lifting), and turned the television onto the first documentary they could find before reclining in their beanbag chairs and being hyper-sensitive to literally everything they felt, heard and saw. It was all horrible, but in an amazing way, and the then loopy Jack had never been afraid of snakes until he saw one fly into a tree from 50 feet away on his tv screen. 

“Jack, I feel like my teeth have fallen out.” Hannibal repeated for what Jack thought was the third time that minute, tapping on his lips as the two watched the documentary. Ironically, he said it as he chewed on his noodles.

“I told you already, you have all your teeth.” Jack answered, holding his bowl with one hand and idly rubbing on the beanbag chair with the other. It was so _scratchy_. How had he never noticed that before?

“Are you sure? My mouth just feels empty.” Hannibal said with a swallow, rushing his fingers down his chin to tap his throat. He was almost certainly trying to feel if he had accidentally eaten any of his teeth

“I'll put it this way- If you don’t have any teeth, then _I_ don’t have any teeth.” He half-answered, pointing at him with his fork and chuckling at the theatrics of his roommate. 

“Well _do_ you have your teeth?”

“Of course I have my teeth.” Jack paused, now not really knowing if he did still have his teeth, and clacked his teeth together just to make sure they were still there. “Yeah, yeah. I’ve got teeth. They’re there.”

“I don’t like not having teeth.” Hannibal seemed to have ignored everything Jack said and looked down at his bowl of noodles, smacking at his piece of pork like he had just been told Christmas was cancelled. “Jack, would you still like me if I was toothless?”

“Duh.” Jack answered plainly. “‘Cause then you’d be like… a dragon.”

“ _What_?”

“Never mind. I keep forgetting that you didn’t have a childhood.” Jack let the reference go unknown and slurped his noodles as if he was putting punctuation to his point.

“Not really, no.” Hannibal admitted. “I did watch every episode of My Little Pony with my sister at some point, though. Never understood why she liked it so much.”

Jack almost said that he was pretty sure everyone watched My Little Pony as a kid, but the documentary’s jump cut to a shark popping out of the Pacific Ocean made him jump so hard he lost all track of thought and two pieces of semi-soggy bok choy- much to his roommate’s marijuana-induced amusement and gut wrenched cackles. For a second time, Jack asked the concaves of his mind what the fuck was up with nature, and grabbed at his heart through his college hoodie with a terrified anxiety despite the growing smile at his own over-exaggeration. 

This was fun, despite the flying snakes, the jumping sharks and the repeated question of ‘do we have teeth?’, and Jack was feeling strangely mushy at the fact that he had such a cool roommate to hang out with- especially when the both of them were higher than the moon. He was always labeled ‘the scary one’ in most of his other classes, with the exception of around 3 people who had latched themselves to him at some point during his sophomore year, and to be able to just relax with someone without wondering whether or not his words or actions would be a problem was...pretty nice. He said ‘pretty nice’ because he had no clue how to just admit that he was more than elated to have a friend like Hannibal, but he didn’t know that and was too prideful to think about his emotions.

About an hour later, the documentary had switched from nature to serial killers and their high had officially peaked past the point of no return, and the two men had their eyes glued on the screen like they were watching breaking news. It sure felt like they were, at least, because every time the narrator would describe how the victim had her eyes slammed out of her skull or how the woman just narrowly evaded the clutches of police, Hannibal would gasp and put a hand to his face like he knew the victim personally. Jack himself was way too out of his own mind to really pay attention to the words the narrator said, mainly because the way she would say 'murder' in her nasally tone made his ears feel weird, but the sight of the fake blood was more than enough to prompt a question to form on his head.

"Hannibal, I have a question." Jack blurted, watching an actor sling an axe up and down on an obviously fake mannequin.

"Yes, Jack?"

"So, let's say your arm gets chopped off. Where do you feel it?"

"Well, obviously you'd feel it in your-" Hannibal's answer started off strong but faltered almost immediately as whipped around to face his roommate, his face growing pale and his reddened eyes expanding almost three times their size. "Holy shit."

"'Cause where can you feel the pain in your arm-"

" _-If your arm is gone?_ "

The fact that Hannibal didn't know the answer to that question despite being a pre-med student was something that made two things abundantly clear:

High Hannibal was _hilarious_ , and the weed they had smoked was way too strong for either of them to handle.

They turned the tv down to hear their thoughts better as they tried to work out just where someone would feel the pain if their arm was cut off, tossing each other theories like 'they'd probably feel it in their other arm' and 'maybe their leg, 'cause that's closest to the arm' until they had no choice but to google it, and since they refused to believe that a person would feel the pain in their shoulder of all places, they came to the conclusion that pain was just a simulation made by the same branch of government that turned pigeons into surveillance cameras and swore never to tell anyone else the jarring truth.

But, after a few minutes of sitting in silence and checking the windows for army tanks in the street just in case the government found out that they knew, they realized that maybe that jarring truth was just jarring dumbassery, and Jack felt himself fall to his knees as he cackled at their genuine paranoia with the clutching of his stomach. Hannibal followed suit- first a chuckle, then a laugh, and then a booming holler that sounded unnatural spilling from the man's mouth- and they laughed at nothing and everything until their downstairs neighbors jammed a broomstick to the ceiling. 

That (and the wall clock that read 3:01 am) was a silent indicator that they probably should have been preparing to go to bed, and with a fist bump and one last smile, Jack and Hannibal made their way to their bedrooms and shut the doors behind them. Staring at the computer, Jack was _this_ close to completing that essay, but flopped down on his bed and closed down the laptop, instead. The him of tomorrow would be more than capable of knocking that out for them the next day, and by the sound of Hannibal's snores in the room across from him, he apparently wasn't the only one who shared in that philosophy. 

He fell asleep as soon as his head hit his pillow and his hoodie was thrown off of his back, and he promised himself that tomorrow, he'd be able to do all of his other assignments before it was time to head to campus.

\---

The next day came, though- and as the men both scrambled around the cramped apartment with the fury of two bats out of hell and occasionally typed on their laptops so loudly people could probably hear it from the hallway of the living complex, Jack figured that all thoughts he had while high were complete and utter bullshit.

With a shared nod as they both ran out of the door to catch the buses to their college campuses before classes started, they agreed that their weed-smoking adventures would be solely assigned for the weekends. 

**Author's Note:**

> There's no way on God's green earth you can look me in the eyes and tell me Hannibal isn't a Peach main. No way.  
> 


End file.
